*** Post Script First — Thursday, December 29th — -1˚C / +30˚F @ 11:11 pm — Just to start this off with something extraordinarily positive — Wonderful Family Friend and Sister we all would have adopted if we had the choice — Lisa — got engaged to her friend Alan — & he seems to be somebody who loves and values her and will cherish her the way she deserves to be cherished. ((( Hey, the odds were tipped so far in the morbid direction in 2016 – something GOOD had to balance it out — 🙂 🙂 🙂 )))

Sunset today from the parking lot of a local Kent building supply store (kind of a Canadian version of a Home Depot clone with friendly local clerks) The sunset looked better in person than it does here. dark charcoal grey clouds along the horizon had much more detail than the camera captured— but this isn’t that bad —

— The ‘Holiday Spirit’ didn’t hit full blast until Christmas Eve, driving home from an emergency run to get a spark plug and 4 stroke oil for our non-starting snow-blower. It was raining on top of maybe six inches or more of semi-recent snow – made the snow look good – lots of houses were decorated with pretty LED lights. Neighbourhoods with a lot of kids had blow-up minions (snow minions?) in front of a couple houses. There were deer made of light (inspired by Harry Potter books?) here and there and with the rain coming down, we flipped to a rock and roll station on the car radio and got ‘Another Brick in the Wall’ to complete the inspiration. Greg Lake might have added a little with “They said it would snow for Christmas – They said there’d be Peace on Earth. But here it just kept on raining – while we wait for the Virgin Birth-” / “The Christmas you get you deserve”.

— Too many people gave up and left the planet this year. On Boxing Day (the 26th) we heard that 572 musicians died in 2016- as opposed to a more normal number, more like 50 in 2015. Paul Kantner of Jefferson Airplane and Greg Lake of Emerson Lake and Palmer hit me harder than most. Prince checked out when I was too rattled to totally embrace the depths of grieving. It was like you can only get hit in the head with a baseball bat so many times before you get so used to the jarring and the electric shock waves running up and down your spine that you can almost shrug off the next couple bashes with an attitude something like, “So what else is new? Hey, thou forces of Evil – Is that all ya got?”

— Sigh, and then Leonard Cohen? – ( Ouch! – Too many very personal memories of listening to his records with various people, and a friend who sang “Suzanne” in local church run coffee houses way back in the sixties – At least, that’s where my memory places it. And then the love of my life having a special thing for her country-man Leonard? And I think we tried to sing a couple things together? okay, so she sang and I croaked along? sigh. Well I have only one thing to say about Leonard checking out the way he did, “Well – Hey-ey, that’s no way-ay to say-ay goodbye”!

— And then Carrie Fisher? CBC has been pretty good about broadcasting highlights from her career. One of the other networks up here had to bash us in the soul with repetitions of how much she struggled with drug addiction issues. When you mention drug addiction three times in a two minute piece, that’s rubbing it in. I don’t remember if CBC news said anything about her struggle with her bi-polar ‘disorder’, but they did mention that she was a spokesperson for people with ‘mental health issues’.

— I’m going to quote my cousin here, “Hey, Carrie, Kick Ass in your next life!” and offer a nice friendly hug to who-ever she might be next time I see her- in whatever world, dimension, or state of being. — Ya did good, kid! —

— sigh –,

— Happy New Year, Happy New Life, Happy New Attitude —

— Hey, God, have we suffered enough yet? Can You just kind of move the bad guys into their own nasty dimension and let them believe they’re still here? And let the good ones move on up to a New Heaven, New Earth? — Are we there yet?

This is probably the book cover in its nearly final state- After another 4 hours of messing with the 3D world building software yesterday.

— This is before I added the title and my name to the right of the avatar/’model’ there. There is more green ground cover below where I cropped it here, if I can figure out how to cover her ‘gear-axe’ I might think about using more of that – I love her expression, and the final touch that made this look really good to me happened when I moved the bar to make it look like the sun was shining from the lower right hand corner off-camera here. That happens if you select the correct setting and set the time to after midnight.

— Saturday I went browsing and searching for a photo of what one of the main characters described as a ‘Stone Lake’ in the novel I started writing in 1987, picked up a couple times, might have tried to re-write from the beginning half a dozen times and got pretty far, um, this would be the third time. The latest working title would be “The Stone Lake Revelations”. Several acres of forest land were blasted away to reveal nearly flat rock. The farmer who discovered this thought it was done by what was described as a massive tornado that touched down there in a freak storm and tossed whole trees miles away. But, um, not to give anything away, that is not what happened….

I think this tweet from yesterday’s browsing is a photo of something somewhere in Switzerland, but I’m not 1,000% sure about that.

— I should add the not-quite-so-tightly-cropped photo here later, but for now —

— I couldn’t get a decent screen shot of her face without a cloud overhead. Schnarr! –

— Only took me all freakin day to put the above together in a 3D game building application. But there it is – Something like this might end up being a book cover if I get the danged thing finished in time to ‘submit’ it to a contest.

“Hungarian Guard Dog” – I don’t think I’d mess with one of these guys – I might ‘soil me armor’ if something like that moved, especially if it was moving toward me. I’d think it was a monster from some not very friendly parallel universe —

— I told my nephew I’d find this picture and send it to him. Only took me two full weeks?

— Um, let’s see, I was looking through some recent very beautiful photos that have come at me through the ‘Tweet-Us-Sphere’ – I wanted to pretty up the screen that pops up when I fire up the computer that doesn’t do much more than grab and keep most of my email. There’s some other stuff that goes into orbit, and I don’t even look at it. But anyway – I also wanted to work on this blog and see if I can pretty it up a bit – [ shrug ] I found this instead and here it is.

I was quite inspired by a couple photos of waterfalls in this morning’s twitter feeds.

— I have no idea where that is, but I think I would like to be there, relaxing to the sound of falling water.

— And this one — waterfall in the back – feels like a canyon or cliff side up closer —

— With the black rocks and their surface patterns, I don’t think that’s anywhere I’ve been.

— Looks like GreenPeace is upping its campaign against the TTIP —

— TTIP = TransAtlantic Trade and Investment Partnership. { I capitalized the A in Atlantic – they didn’t. }

— & Here’s another inspiring look at another river and the canyon it might have carved. —

— The above river and canyon might be in Portugal. { or maybe the tweeter is in Portugal? Or both? } But that looks like another wonderful place to go for a boat ride.

— Peter Coade , a weather person with a comforting, character-filled voice, is retiring. He is out of Nova Scotia, and we heard him giving morning weather forecasts for our section of New Brunswick enough to appreciate him. —

— A favourite local weather person is retiring, today would have been his final pre-retirement broadcast. I really liked his voice and his delivery. This guy sounded like a best friend and valued neighbour. He earned his retirement, but I’ll miss hearing his forecasts.

— { “Cultural Diversity enriches everybody -” – Me. } I grew up in a hostile environment and I didn’t have as many strikes against me before I started as lots of people did, who continue to need to struggle against intense opposition to glean any little bit of self-esteem they can beg, borrow or steal in this world. Nobody should have to beg, borrow or steal their self-esteem, it should be a natural birth right.

— Of course, even in a day filled with inspiring photographs, we are reminded that not everything is peaches and cream. And not all that peaches and cream isn’t poisoned with Genetically Modified Ingredients. –

— Each tear is a poet, a healer, a teacher? — This may be true if someone in your environment is a nurturer. —

— Nice sentiment, but with the epidemic of youthful suicides – especially in First Nations/Native American communities, too many tears don’t get a chance to teach anybody anything but intense pain. I believe it’s time to pray that all people in distress get enough loving attention to pick them up and pat them on the back and convince them way down deep that they are loved, that they are valued, that they mean a lot to all of us. Forget the hate-mongers.

Let me see if I can remember this one:“- The world is a braided pumpkin – sitting on the shoulder of a worm – Your smile just saved a million lives— Isn’t Love Outrageous? — “

— I wrote the ‘poem’ in quotes after reading about a form of Chinese or Zen poetry. The first line makes a statement. The second line expands on the first. The third line introduces something else entirely. And the fourth line ties it all together. I knew I scored with this poem when a serious musician friend read it and nearly fell on the floor laughing. That was before ‘rotfl’ entered our consciousness as a thing.

— As a child I was slightly afraid of the dark. As a young adult I thought, ‘Most monstrous humans are peacefully asleep at night.’ Now I kind of embrace the idea that night time can be almost all things to all people. Wonderful, terrifying, peacefully inspiring & any number of other things. —

— Looks like somebody had fun with World Building Software. 🙂 Or they photo-shopped the heck out of the above…

— “Shooting Star over the Giants’ Causeway?” —

— Um – okay, I’ll admit it, I sometimes have trouble seeing photos of this place without hearing strains from Led Zeppelin’s “Houses of the Holy” album. But this is one ‘cool’ photograph.

— This is from a couple days ago, but it kind of fits this section of this post. —

— Um, I don’t think the people living in Pompeii the day of the eruption thought Nature was all that wise. That statement may have had some kind of Karmic poetic justice behind it, or brought some really tough lessons for those who didn’t survive – But, other than that, yeah, Nature and Wisdom go hand in hand, 99% of the time, and human ‘consciousness’ will doubt that connection during the other 1%.

— Once again, I thought I’d check the ‘Tweet-Us-Sphere’ and found a lot to think about, a little bit to gag over, a lot of cute kitten and puppy photos and some really gorgeous – although possibly photo-shopped – landscapes and even city-scapes. This morning.

— This was from two days ago, but it’s worth repeating here, I do believe —

— I have spiritual connections with both J.L. and Donovan – Used to calm crying babies down by playing some of Donovan’s riffs on my Ovation guitar – “Don’t let appearances fool you -“

Stop worrying about what others think of you —

— If today had a ‘Tweet-Us-Theme’ it was “Stop worrying about how others see you/ Don’t measure yourself by what you see/think you see others achieving/being-“

— Example # 2 – Ya can’t live somebody else’s life —

— I get conflicting opinions about what Steve Jobs was all about. He is portrayed as a person who liked to shock people, who ‘outed’ people who didn’t share his style of doing things, [ shamed a guy as a ‘virgin’ for wearing a suit to a meeting at Apple when Jobs showed up barefoot and ultra casual —> in a TeeVee movie about the development of the personal computer – ] A close friend had her brother bring Steve Wozniak home to a suburb of Los Angeles with a version of one of the earliest Apple computers which he was bringing to a science fair in La La land – from photos, I guessed that Steve Wozniak would be a lot easier to get along with than Steve Jobs. But then somebody told me that Steve Jobs was a Yogi and handed out books on Yoga philosophy to lots of people. & studied the same school of Yoga as George Harrison & other notables — famous people in this group did not go on television singing the praises of their Guru or anything like that. If you didn’t know Who they followed or what they believed, you wouldn’t learn from the media.

— First – The Pretty Stuff — Sunset in Paris —

— Wow? – Inspiring, hey? But then a Yogi friend told me I lived in Paris in a recent life. I was an Artist who supported my serious endeavors by doing pencil sketches on the streets for paying customers. At first I thought that was a bit off, then, come to think of it, I was super frustrated in high school when 99% of my drawings did not come anywhere near to measuring up to what I thought they should be. & Later, I discovered that when I told my ego to shut the bleep up and let go and let my hands do their thing – I was surprised at the results. And, when I was in my late 30’s I dreamed that my middle sister lived with or near me in Paris in that life time and she was quite taken by the charisma of a guy who was the center of attention at a lot of parties. She married that guy in this life and learned that he was an egocentric jerk – heck, he tried to pick up the woman I brought to their wedding – but she didn’t see that — That was her first marriage — The second one turned out a lot better.

& This from “Half Past Human dot com” — Clif is real good at picking up trends in slight changes in linguistics used on the internet and has been uncanny in his ability to see what is coming in the near future, that we subsconsciously know is out there – & winging our way.

— If this guy [ Clif ] told me to head for higher ground, I would grab what I could and beat it in a hurry – climb the highest mountain I could reach.

— The Powers that think they be — { Read the bit in the lower box first to see what they’re responding to in the upper part of this tweet. } Somebody probably did not realize this would fly out there into the chaos that is the ‘Tweet-Us-Sphere’.

— Um, in the 1939 World’s Fair { Before my time – but I saw black and white television memories of it – } and even the 1964 World’s Fair { I did not go to that one either, a friend took me to the park that might still be at the site of that one. } There was lots of talk about how wonderful the future would be – we’d have flying cars and smart highways that we could hook our non-flying cars up to and sit back and relax, be pulled along and warned before the connection would drop us off at our exit – And we would have loads of free time to pursue higher education and creative hobbies because robots would be doing a lot of the repetitive mind numbing work we all had to do before this new age of enlightenment would dawn on us. Then greedy people began busting unions and implementing third world economic warfare on the middle class and creating a climate of constant fear and anxiety so they could manipulate all of us into the state of mind where some of us actually think Hitler’s rhetoric recycled through Donald J Trump’s mouth makes sense and his ideology just might save us from the monsters under our beds and in our kids’ closets. { Do Not Believe That! } {{{ Read “The Energy Non-Crisis” by Lindsey Williams }}}

— Flashback to my early youth —

— I know the feeling. Before my fifth birthday, one night when I was having difficulty getting to sleep, lying there in the dark, watching ghosts float across the room toward me in quite the stately procession – I did finally start to drift off and then heard a voice I thought was my grandfather talking to me through the wonders of a magic telephone enabled by the springs in my bed? “Do you know who I am?” – Me: “Yeah, you’re my grandfather-” “I have a message for you, Somebody ‘Important’ over here believes you could be quite a good writer if you want to be…” some things would be changed in this life, rearranged to develop and accent my writing abilities — not everything would be ‘easy street’ but I’d get a lot out of this, if I said ‘Yes’ — I said, “Yes.” And while still young, like before sixth grade? I quite often felt drawn to pads of blank paper, and really liked the feel of some books when I picked them up and held them. I felt compelled to write stuff and then often felt awful because I had taken these beautiful blank pages and filled them with very sloppy handwriting and stories that went nowhere. My first story? A dog and a rabbit were best friends – that’s all I remember now. I knew dogs and rabbits were natural enemies, so I wanted them to be best friends. I figured I had to start with kids stories, right? {{{ & Aimee Richardson and other young actors impressed me when twitter suggested I check them out. REALLY impressed me. I used to think anybody who looked as good as some of them do would never need to use their minds or their ‘higher sensibilities’ if all they had to do was smile just right at some ‘eligible rich guy’ and have anything they needed or wanted delivered to them on a virtual silver platter – but too may of these kids { who are young enough to be my grandchildren, shhhhh don’t tell anybody I admitted to that…. } really do have beautiful ‘old souls’ and that shines through – 🙂

— Looks like up north —

— Looks like Newfoundland – or northern Scotland or Scandinavia or Russia or —–

— I did go out of my way to copy and save a tweet underlining in red a lot of things that were not asked during last night’s debate. That tweet was posted by somebody who obviously has it in for Hillary. I am not a Hillary fan. & I have a sneaking suspicion some more ‘Fit’ will hit the ‘Shan’ before the election. But ‘we don’t need no stinkin recycled third reich bull chips!’ either. How far do you think we could get with a write in campaign? Or wait a minute —-

— Couple days ago — my friend responded to this ‘vote’ and sent me a screen shot of the results — This happened last Sunday, don’t go looking to vote now. —

— I have no idea whether tons of Republicans found out about this ‘Vote’ and heavily ‘stuffed the ballot box’ – but – look how well the third and fourth party candidates are received in the real world beyond US borders. { the ‘republican’ results smell too much like A ‘Newt Gingritch Clone’ got every man woman and child card carryin’ republican with a twitter account to hurry up and vote here ]

— Ooops – how’d that get in here? —

— I told you we get more than our share of cuter than bleep kittens and puppies and even bears and other scary things within the expanding microverse that is twitter — & If I know anything about orange cats — this guy might have just pooped in there or brought a bloody dead mouse in with him — { or her } —

— And — to close on a beautiful note – Venice — hope it doesn’t sink due to global climate schnarr —

— I might add another smallish bit liberated from twitter pages the other day —

— I forget what I might have said about this in another blog…. ‘duh’ —

— I woke up this morning thinking it was Tuesday. Last Friday morning, Cathi was so sure that it was Saturday that she turned off her alarm after it went off. So I guess whatever we’re experiencing, it’s contagious. 😉

— Yesterday, we ‘discovered’ a couple farm stands on Hwy 105 South – on the east side of the St John River. Cathi had already seen them a while back and wanted to go there to check out what they had for sale, this was our first opportunity to do that. I thought we were in Jemseg. Cathi later told somebody that Jemseg is actually 50 kilometers south of where we were, in Maugerville. The first farm stand is one I heard about before – with a giant potato man waving at traffic in front of the building. It had been in the same family for generations and the sad farmer came to the realization that his offspring didn’t want to continue on with the tradition, so he was selling it. The second one, above, had this side yard with several penned up farm animals: goats, sheep, alpacas – and a bit of a playground to keep kids happy and busy while they were there. Yesterday also had a bunch of ‘sunshowers’ popping up all afternoon. You can see one approaching in this photograph- a couple minutes later it was pouring rain in just as bright sunshine and most of the animals ran under the roof of a small shelter like building in the centre of this fenced off area. Signs all around the fence there say “Animals May Bite” & in essence: ‘Don’t do anything stupid-‘ 🙂

George Orwell has been re-tweeted a lot in the past couple days. I want to see what this book is all about. This tweeter isn’t the most diplomatic and/or refined individual in the ‘tweet-us-sphere’, but he usually has something interesting to say. 🙂

Binged on season two of “Manhattan” last night. Watched all ten episodes. That was one heck of a television series. I betcha the guy who first described television as ‘the wasteland’ would have been positively impressed-

But then I woke up with a wicked headache this morning, and after a little bit of coffee and pleasant distraction later and I was fine.

I did let Jassper drag me up and down the street around sunset, he needed to sniff ever inch of both sides of our cul-de-sac here. & he only needed to roll around and bond with the snow and ice twice, but he did need to stick his nose deeply into snow banks in several spots, had to be reminded to, “Easy- Take it easy!” several times and only nearly yanked me off my feet once.

Re: Mercury Retrograde: I seem to be deeply introspective about my writing this time. & Deeply concerned about what I ‘put out there’ and/or leave behind when I graduate to the next level of existence – I would much rather leave behind a positively inspiring legacy than be rolling in riches. Now where do I concentrate my efforts? Hmmmmm-

It’s been a while since I’ve been able to even attempt this. Maybe Mercury Retrograde is trying to tell me I should be keeping up with goals I sort of set myself when I was silly enough to believe I had enough time to follow through with them.

Okay- My Canadian Friends have a new Prime Minister and a new “Government” that can’t be as bad and can’t be as mean-spirited as the ex Prime Minister or his ‘Conservative Government’. One friend told me he used to have a ‘protest button’ that said “Part of the way with LBJ” when a lot of misled Democrats were wearing “All the way with LBJ” and others were wearing buttons that said, “The Great Society / Bullets Bombs and Bullshit” I was a little bit young back then and thought it would cool to be old enough to get away with wearing a button that spelled out “B.S.” for everybody to see.

And now I’m sitting here wondering if the Justin Trudeau ‘government’ can possibly live up to the hopes and dreams of anybody who voted him (and ‘them’) in- I suppose dreams just might come true-

-Okay, I’m almost ready to hit the ‘Publish’ button, I should probably run this through the spelling checker first and see if I can keep this going at least until Mercury stops moon walking backward across the sky-

How about a quote from RFK jr? I thought we’d already fallen through the Oligarchy phase and were about to be jack-booted into all out fascism.

Has anybody heard of the phrase “Equal protection under the law”? or “Equal treatment under the law”? Or should we revive Arlo Guthrie’s “Pause for Mister Claus” in which he quips that one of the great things about America is that they will go after anybody, even ‘the last guy’ who he describes as the most destitute person in the USA -not in those words-

Yeah, yeah, this is yesterday’s news, but this is the first chance I had to sit down and do anything about it. And, so much is happening you might have missed this.

Now this is suspicious – It looks like they’re trying to impose martial law where that hasn’t been declared, and how the bleep can you charge somebody who isn’t in the armed services with insubordination? And if they do get away with this in Canada, what’s next? & Where else will they try this kind of nonsense?

How many times do we have to be lied to before we stand up and scream, “Just Give Me the Truth!” John Lennon, are you working with us from the other side?

Some of my conspiracy watch type friends said that George Orwell was an Elitist, or at least the son of Elitists, and “1984” was something he tried to tell us was coming to a street corner near you. But a quote like this makes sense, even if this is not the best photo I’ve ever seen of him.

— We thought we lost all the content on a blog that was hosted on another server. But we knocked ourselves out and learned how to fix problems that shut down the other server and then learned how to export content from the ‘infected’ blog to this one.

— And it looked like the process worked. At least, so far-

— We may have lost some photos and images, but I can’t tell for certain yet.

— & right now I’m trying hard to remember what the header image on the old site looked like.

— But anyway, Doug Otterson did a lot of work on the original blog and much of what we managed to import was work he had done, including quite a few pages copied from Indigo Night Eagle’s older blog.

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Editor In Chief:

I began this life about 50 miles East of New York City, in Fairfield County, Connecticut, and would probably be a suicide statistic if it wasn't for the 'Real' friends I made in Vermont, New Hampshire & upper New York State. Being creative and sensitive has its ups and downs - mostly up lately- loving life and love in Atlantic Canada. :)